Here’s what happens to your TiVo when you miss an entire weekend of catching up on your television viewing (number of unwatched episodes in italics):

Oprah Winfrey (4) – but no Faith and Tim, mind you. I’m still aggrieved.

Starting Over (4) – I’m surprised David didn’t delete these while I was gone.

House Hunters (11) – yes, you read correctly. Eleven episodes.

Paula’s Home Cooking (5) – maybe she’ll make this again!

24 (3) – I’m distressed by how behind I am so early in the season.

Survivor – Panama – Exile Island (1) – Eh, not so sure I care.

Dancing With The Stars (2) – Drew Lachey does the tango!

Arrested Development (1) – the two-hour series finale. Sigh.

That’s twenty three hours of television for those of you keeping score at home.

Don’t get me started about how I’m going to make time for the Olympics. But I’ll find a way. I will!

Email me if you’d like to babysit so that I can pile up on the sofa for a solid day of Watching All The Programming.

A girl has to have her priorities, you know.

Watching Alex open his Valentines from his Mother’s Day Out friends made my heart explode just a teeny. tiny. bit. He would look at each one and say, “OH, MAMA – it’s for Alex, and it’s BEAUTIFUL!”

I’m afraid I’m smitten with this little fella.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

My SiteMeter is showing that we have a new BooMama reader.

From Parchman, Mississippi.

Um. Welcome!???

[Pinched grin.]

To be honest, it’s not really an audience I planned on having.

But we’re, um, delighted to have you, Parchman reader. I’m sure you’re a wonderful person who really didn’t do what the authorities accused you of doing. I’m sure it was all a big mistake.

Really!

[Looks paranoid.]

Now that I think about it, though, I imagine that our Parchman reader is not in fact in prison, just a non-incarcerated resident of the MS Delta. :-)

And seriously – welcome.

When I was a little girl, I had blonde hair. Realllly blonde hair. And even though it got a little darker as I got older, I could keep it “touched up” with highlights once or twice a year. It was a pretty inexpensive solution – I’d sit down in my stylist’s chair, let him or her wrap the top of my head in foils, and 45 minutes later I’d have lovely light blonde highlights to accent the only somewhat darker blonde hair.

And then I got pregnant. Them young’uns, I tell you – they change everything.

For some reason (and I’m sure there are many scientific theories but you know that science, it does not interest me), my hair got much darker and much straighter as a result of my pregnancy. I thought at the time that, once Alex was born, my hair would magically lighten and curl again, but such was not the case.

As a result, I was forced into an expensive bi-monthly highlighting habit. And the stuff in the box or the bottle? It wasn’t an option. Oh, several times I tried to self-highlight, but the results were always disastrous: my hair would turn out orange-ish, streaky, brassy, and one time in particular, somewhat green. I usually ended up back at the salon I was trying to avoid, with my home-highlighted head hung in shame. I would be reprimanded by my stylist, spend 45 minutes with color strippers and re-activators and de-activators on my head, and then, with some semblance of normal blonde color restored, I would pay my $140, promise to never darken Walmart’s hair color aisle again, and go about my bottled blonde business.

For the last year or so I’ve been a good little hair salon girl. I’ve left the highlighting to the professionals, and I haven’t so much as eyeballed a box of Nice and Easy or Feria or whathaveyou.

But this past weekend, I fell off of the wagon.

I should tell you that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been bummed out by my hair. The cut is fine – but the color has looked mousy and dull and boring. It’s hard to get an appointment at my salon, and besides that, I’m cheap. I haven’t wanted to spend the big bucks. I figured I’d go with the natural look for the rest of the winter, then brighten myself up with some highlights in the spring.

That was before I saw several of my friends this past weekend. I couldn’t help but notice the way their highlights framed their face, or the way their color expertly covered the gray, or the way they looked bright-eyed and radiant because they had something other than dishwater blonde hair falling onto their foreheads. And Friday night, in a fit of spontanaiety, I said, “Hey! Who wants to highlight my hair?”

Tracey was all over it. She couldn’t get to CVS fast enough.

And that is how Tracey and I found ourselves at Katy’s kitchen table at 11:00 Saturday night – me with a plastic cap on my head, Tracey with the little plastic tool that enabled her to pull my hair through the openings in the cap, Katy asleep on her couch and completely oblivious to both of us. Oh, we had a large time, with a great deal of our conversation sounding like what you’d hear in any Southern beauty shop: “And then I told her…well, I didn’t believe it at first, but honey, it IS true…can you believe that? I could not BELIEVE that…yes, and he is her second husband – wonder what she’ll do to her third?”

You get the idea.

I was fairly apprehensive about the whole process, what with Tracey not being a trained cosmetologist and all. I do give her great credit, because she was as thorough as could be, even if I did let out a few “YEEEEOWWWW”s as she tried to get various tangled masses through very small plastic holes. Then she mixed up the solution, put it on my hair, and for 27 minutes, we waited.

Imagine my surprise when I washed and dried my hair and discovered highlights that were the perfect shade of blonde. Not brassy. Not orange. Not green. Just a light, pretty blonde color – exactly what I would’ve wanted and expected if I was shelling out $140 at a salon.

And you know what it cost? $9.99.

Plus tax, of course.

I think Tracey may have found her post-mama calling.

*This weekend I learned that Curl Up And Dye is the name of an actual salon outside of Memphis. Only in the South, y’all.

Blogger just spontaneously ingested a long post that I started this morning, and the recent events convince me that the internets, they conspire against me. I’ll try to recreate the post this afternoon if Alex will cooperate and take a nice, long nap, preferably one about four hours in length.

I’m way overdue, I know – I’m starting to feel like I did my freshman year in college, when I had a paper due on Dante’s Inferno but, funny thing, I didn’t actually read Inferno, which made the writing a bit problematic. Fortunately for me, my current writing doesn’t require any background work except for, you know, living, so hopefully I’ll get back up to speed soon.

After a loooong day of traveling, Alex and I rolled into the garage about 7:15 tonight. I have burned up the interstate the last couple of days, but it was so worth it. Just a few items of note before I put the little man in the tub and try to recharge my batteries before Monday morning hits:

1) If someone ever questions whether Southern hospitality still exists, he or she needs to attend a gathering that Melanie and Katy coordinate. OH MY WORD at the spreads and dips and fruits and unusual chip products and whole grain breads and meats and cheeses and exotic cracker assortments. While Melanie acted like she just ran by Whole Foods and “picked up a few things,” she actually purchased approximately one quarter of the Baton Rouge store’s inventory and then created a beautiful tablescape with her McCarty pottery. Katy, competely on the sly, planned a private little shopping excursion to this great place called FeBe, arranged for us to get our make-up done, and then surprised me with a purse that I had pointed out in the first few minutes we were shopping (when I got home and David saw the purse, he said, “so, did the person who designed that know you? Because it looks exactly like you”). Thanks, K & M. Everything was perfect.

2) If someone ever wonders why my former neighbor Kristi and I got along so well, I will explain it now: we laugh almost non-stop when we’re in each other’s company. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in about four years, it was like someone had just hit a pause button on our last in-person conversation, and this weekend we got to pick up exactly where we left off.

3) If someone ever tries the sweet tea at the Popeye’s in McComb, MS, and finds it entirely too sweet, think long and hard before you ask an employee if there’s any unsweetened tea. Tracey asked today, and she received the following reply: “I don’t know.” I kind of appreciated the complete lack of interest in customer care and wondered how that laissez-faire attitude might filter down into other Popeye’s inquiries. Just imagine:
“Do y’all have any fried chicken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do y’all have any biscuits?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do y’all have any food?”
“I don’t know.”

4) If someone is ever reluctant to leave a toddler with grandparents because they think the toddler will miss them terribly and never know happiness again, be ye not afraid. As it turns out, toddlers are actually beside themselves with happiness when unlimited supplies of Coke, pizza, ice cream, cookies, Coke, donuts, Cheetos, Coke, Coke, and Coke are available. As I pulled out of Mama and Daddy’s driveway this afternoon, Alex actually started to cry and said, “I wanna stay with Pappa! Wanna eat Cheetos!”

5) If someone wants to understand one of the reasons why I feel blessed beyond all measure, he or she should meet my friends. On my little three-day road trip I got to see some friends from every stop in the road: childhood friends, high school friends, college friends, neighbor friends. It made me appreciate the friends I got to see and miss the ones I didn’t…but more than anything, if just made me grateful.

More later.